Visconti's Forgotten Heir
Elizabeth Power
At her new job interview, single-mum Magenta James feels like her life is finally back on track after suffering from amnesia. Until she meets Andreas Visconti’s familiar sapphire gaze across the desk…She just knows the Italian CEO is the father of her child, but when she doesn’t get the job, it’s clear they parted on bad terms. Then he offers her a new role… as his very personal assistant.Now Magenta will have to rearrange the scattered puzzle of her memory in order to make sense of the sensual tension that burns between them…
‘There isn’t any vacancy, is there? You just wanted me to stay behind so that you could taunt me with whatever it is you think I did to you in the past. So go ahead. Get it all out of your system!’
At least then she might know, once and for all, what it was all about.
Instead Andreas merely laughed, that soft mirthless laugh that seemed as controlled and calculated as everything else about him. Then with a suddenness that had Magenta’s instincts leaping onto red alert, he reached out and caught one end of her scarf. Winding it carefully around his finger, he drew her gently into his dominating sphere.
‘Is this a fashion thing?’ He tugged lightly at the silk. ‘Or is its purpose merely to conceal the remnants of a current lover’s carnal appetite?’
‘How dare you!’ She made to push him away, only to find her hands trapped between his own and the warm hard wall of his chest.
‘Yes, I dare,’ he growled as his head came down, stopping with his mouth just a breath from hers.
It was the unfathomable dark emotion she saw in his eyes as her trembling gaze wavered beneath his that seemed to rob the breath from her lungs—that and the thunderous hammering of his heart.
She wasn’t sure who made the next move, but suddenly their mouths were fused in hungry and antagonized passion and her arms were sliding up around his neck as his stronger ones tightened around her, welding her to him.
ELIZABETH POWER wanted to be a writer from a very early age, but it wasn’t until she was nearly thirty that she took to writing seriously. Writing is now her life. Travelling ranks very highly among her pleasures, and so many places she has visited have been recreated in her books. Living in England’s West Country, Elizabeth likes nothing better than taking walks with her husband along the coast or in the adjoining woods, and enjoying all the wonders that nature has to offer.
Recent titles by the same author:
A GREEK ESCAPE
A DELICIOUS DECEPTION
BACK IN THE LION’S DEN
SINS OF THE PAST
Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk
Visconti’s Forgotten Heir
Elizabeth Power
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Alan—for always being there
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#u824b5092-1503-51b1-a919-ba86d31fff84)
CHAPTER TWO (#ufc4bfba2-766d-588d-8a44-a0f71d4222f0)
CHAPTER THREE (#u7a4f168c-30ec-58cd-b056-f9d3afffc1d9)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
AS SOON AS she laid eyes on the broad-shouldered man who had just stepped through the door of the crowded wine bar Magenta knew that he was the father of her child.
She didn’t suspect, or wonder, or even hope. She simply knew.
The stem of the glass she had been wiping suddenly snapped from the tension gripping her fingers, and as she put a steadying hand to her forehead she heard Thomas, her work colleague, enquire, ‘Are you all right?’
The laid-back, long-haired college graduate who, like her, was helping out part-time behind the bar until something better came along, was frowning as he came away from the cash register.
She shook her head. Not in answer, but in an attempt to make some sense of the jumble of distant memories that were leaping chaotically through her brain.
Anger. Hostility. Passion. Over all a hungry, all-consuming passion...
Someone spoke to her, trying to give her an order, and she looked up at them with her velvety-brown eyes dazed and her fine features ashen against the darker sheen of her thick swept-up hair.
‘Would you mind serving my customer for me?’ she appealed croakily to her colleague and, dumping the two pieces of glass and the tea towel down behind the counter, made a hasty bid for the merciful seclusion of the Ladies’.
Grabbing the cracked and solitary basin, she struggled to regain her composure, her lungs dragging in air.
Andreas Visconti. Of course. How could she ever have let anyone persuade her into believing that her child might have been fathered by anyone else when she’d known in her heart that she wasn’t the type of woman to sleep around, even during those lost and irretrievable months of her life?
She felt sick and stayed where she was, leaning over the basin, until the nausea subsided, trying to sort out the tangle of erratic thoughts and images in her mind.
The doctors had told her not to try and force things, and as the years had passed they had said that the memories she had lost might never come back. But they were going to. Even if they were appearing like the distorted shapes of a jigsaw puzzle she was going to have to piece together. Either way, right now, she thought, hearing the outer door open and one of the regular bar staff urgently calling to her, she had to go back out there and face the music. Even if she didn’t know—or like—the tune that might be playing.
* * *
As the countless people in front of him were gradually served, and a spindly young man finally took his order, at first Andreas Visconti thought he was imagining things when his gaze drifted to the young woman who was filling glasses further along the bar.
She was slim, beautiful and flawlessly photogenic, with her magnificent hair pinned up to emphasise high cheekbones, stunning dark eyes and a lovely mouth above that long, elegant neck. The vision of her held Andreas in thrall. As if he was seeing a ghost. Or hallucinating. Both of which were pretty unlikely, he thought wryly, for a hardened cynic like himself.
Then someone called her name and he realised that he wasn’t imagining things. It really was her. Magenta James. The girl to whom he had once almost sacrificed his heart—and the whole of his life.
She was looking over her shoulder, listening to something a much older man, whom he guessed was the landlord, was saying, and cruel memory made a hard slash of Andreas’s mouth as he caught her tight and rather strained-sounding little laugh.
The last time he had heard that sound was when she had ridiculed his lack of prospects, flaying him with accusations of trying to hold her back from the glittering career she intended to pursue. And now here was Miss High-and-Mighty James pouring drinks in a West Country wine bar! He was, he decided grimly, going to enjoy the next few minutes!
Abandoning the position he had virtually fought to secure, he allowed his curiosity to pull him through the sea of Friday-night revellers which, sensing an unspoken authority, parted effortlessly for him as he shouldered his way along the crowded bar to where she was working.
‘Hello, Magenta.’
* * *
Beneath her simple black dress—her only concession to colour was the red and black choker she wore around her neck—Magenta’s whole body stiffened.
It was inevitable, she thought, her heart racing uncontrollably, that he would notice her. Speak to her. She was unprepared, however, for what his deep, chocolate-rich voice would do to her—or for the impact of his masculinity at close quarters as she turned around from returning a bottle to its shelf at the back of the mirrored bar.
‘Andreas...’ She could hardly find her voice as she met his unflinching eyes. Sapphire-blue eyes that were a legacy of his mother’s English heritage. How easily she had remembered that! she thought, amazed, when her mind was struggling to remember anything else. But those eyes were glittering with a chilling clarity, and though Magenta strove to recall exactly what it was that had transpired between them she was certain of nothing beyond the feeling that they had parted on bad terms. Very bad.
‘Quite a surprise,’ he commented dryly. ‘For both of us, I would imagine.’
Now Magenta recognised a transatlantic lilt in his deep tones that she somehow knew hadn’t been there six years ago, and with another kick from the darker corners of her mind she recognised that the healthy bronze of his skin owed as much to time spent living in the States as to his Anglo-Italian roots.
His well-layered hair was shining like polished jet beneath the lights, but he looked bigger, broader and tougher than the young man surfacing from her memory banks. This man was harder and more forceful. His maturity was reflected in the span of his wide shoulders, and in that commanding air that said he had done a lot of living, while his darkly shaded jaw and the dark hair that was curling above the open neckline of his casual yet beautifully tailored striped shirt seemed to scream of his virility.
‘I have to admit,’ he was saying, oblivious to the turmoil going on inside her, ‘this isn’t the sort of place I would have expected to find you.’
His thinly veiled cynicism stopped her from telling him that her job there two evenings a week was just one of her means of being gainfully employed. That she had a day job as a typist and would shortly be moving on to better things if the position she had been shortlisted for and was pinning every last hope on came good during the course of the coming week.
The need to recover those lost months of her life was more pressing than the need to maintain her self-esteem, so now, overcoming her fear of what the answer might be, she ventured to ask, ‘Wh-where exactly had you expected to find me?’
His mouth jerked down at one side in a gesture of increasing cynicism. ‘Is that meant to be some sort of joke?’
The hardness of his eyes made Magenta feel as though she was being touched by cold steel. But, whatever he had expected of her, he wasn’t aware that she had lost her memory, was he?
She wanted to tell him but he seemed so hostile, and yet she was trying to make sense of the wildfire he’d ignited in her blood the second she had seen him walk into the bar.
Even the solid barrier of the counter between them couldn’t protect her from the images which were bursting from her memory banks. Images of this man kissing her. Undressing her. Of his deep voice whispering sensual phrases that had driven her mindless for him as he’d pleasured and worshipped her body...
She might have forgotten but her body hadn’t. This realisation hit her with frightening clarity. And yet the specifics of the bitter conflict that stood so obviously between them continued to elude her memory.
Trying again, she uttered almost involuntarily, ‘I don’t remember you,’ and flinched as her flat little statement produced a sharp, incisive laugh from him.
‘You mean you don’t want to,’ he amended with a humourless smile.
I mean I don’t. I don’t remember what happened.
She put her hand to her forehead, trying to smooth out the chaos of jumbled pieces that were floating up from that part of her brain that remained dormant. In denial.
‘You were younger.’ She brought her hand down slowly. ‘Thinner.’ And surely possessing only a fraction of the dynamism of the man who stood before her now?
‘Most probably, as I was only twenty-three.’
And working like a slave in your father’s restaurant.
Where had that come from? Magenta wondered as another recollection kicked in to bring her hand up to her head again.
‘Are you all right?’
Through the buzz of conversation she caught an element of concern in the deep, masculine voice.
‘Has seeing me again been too much for you? You look a little pale.’
‘Well, anyone would compared to you,’ she said snappily, realising that he still didn’t understand or believe her. ‘You look disgustingly healthy.’
‘Yes, well...’ His hard mouth quirked, tugging in a gesture that was all at once familiar, lazy and disturbingly sensual. ‘Life’s been good.’
He seemed to need to tell her that, she decided, sifting through the chaff and debris in her mind to try and discover what it was that had brought them from lovers to this hostile place where they now found themselves. But just at that moment her gaze fell to the two tumblers that Thomas had come to put down on the counter in front of them.
A Scotch and soda for Andreas and a bottle of orange juice for...
Trying not to be too obvious, Magenta made a quick survey of the crowded space behind him, catching his mocking expression before she was able to assess who he might have brought with him. She asked quickly, ‘Do you come here often?’
Had she really asked him something so trite? So totally banal? she thought, cringing.
‘Never.’ He was reaching into the pocket of superbly cut grey trousers as Thomas flipped the cap off the orange juice bottle.
‘So what brings you here tonight?’ Magenta swallowed, wondering why she was dallying with such trivia when all she wanted to do was grab him by the pristine cloth of his shirt and demand that he tell her what had happened between them—except she was afraid of finding out.
Dragging her gaze from the glass that was being filled, she lifted her velvety-brown eyes to his. A little frisson of awareness shivered through her when she noticed him assessing the slender lines of her body, saw his lips move in a calculated smile.
‘Who knows?’ he murmured, deeply aware. ‘Fate?’
For a moment, from the way he was looking at her and from the husky note he had infused into that beautiful voice of his, the years seemed to fall away and she was nineteen again. Free-spirited. Giddy with hope. Flighty. That was what she remembered someone calling her in those days. Yet, whatever faults or failings she might have possessed, she knew now that she had been desperately, terrifyingly besotted with the man before her.
‘So what is this?’ On that rather derogatory note he jerked his chin towards where she stood on the service side of the bar. ‘A bit of pin money between assignments? Or didn’t the modelling world quite live up to everything you were hoping for?’ He tossed a note down on the counter to cover the cost of the drinks.
Of course. Her modelling career. Or lack of it, she thought wryly. Because it had never really taken off.
‘Not everything works out the way we plan,’ she responded quietly, absently aware of her younger colleague picking up the note before moving away to the till. Thomas was used to customers chatting her up, even if this particular customer had more wow factor than all the others put together.
‘Really? So what happened to Rushford? The miracle-maker?’
The deeply intoned words burned with something corrosive, and she wasn’t sure whether it was that or the sound of the name that made her suddenly shiver.
‘Didn’t he live up to your expectations either? And there I was, under the impression you were really going places with that guy.’
With Marcus Rushford? Magenta wanted to laugh out loud. Instead she was suddenly despairing at how her mind could have let her forget Andreas and yet retained a nightmarish memory of the slick-talking managing agent who had been promoting her for a while.
Confusion swirled around her and she had to take a deep breath to stem the almost physical pain that trying to remember produced.
‘Well, as I said...’ She gave a little shrug and felt a surge of panic when she realised she had completely forgotten what it was she had been going to say. It still happened sometimes. Times like now, when she felt hot and flummoxed and abnormally stressed. ‘Not...’ Mercifully the words flooded back, even though she stumbled over them in attempting to get them out. ‘Not...everything goes to plan.’
‘Evidently not.’ He glanced towards where Thomas was waiting behind the middle-aged man who clearly paid their wages, who was sorting out some problem with the cash machine.
Magenta wished he would hurry up. It was purgatory standing there talking to a man who so clearly resented her when her screaming senses were taunting her with the knowledge of how his skin had felt beneath her fingers and how he had shown her pleasure such as her untutored body had never known. If it had been untutored, she thought. As far as she knew she could have been as free with her favours as her mother had led her to believe. She had no recollection of those lost months of her life, but her torpid brain had always rejected that thought as repugnant and totally alien to her.
‘So what happened to the career? Did Rushford fail to deliver on his promises? Or is that just a rumour? Like the way he cut loose because he couldn’t face the responsibility of fatherhood?’
The fact that this man knew she had been expecting a baby sent Magenta’s thoughts spinning in a vortex of confusion. Her hand went to her forehead. Noticing the way it trembled, she brought it quickly down again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding anything but. ‘Is that still a sore point?’
His sarcasm dug deep, but she was too busy trying to stay upright to ask him why he believed Theo was Marcus Rushford’s child.
Gripping the edge of the bar with both hands for support, and dragging in lungfuls of much-needed air, she murmured, ‘I’d prefer not to discuss my son, if it’s...all the same to you.’ Had he detected that awkwardness—that lack of fluency in her speech which it had taken her a long time to overcome? ‘Not here. Not over a bar.’
Not anywhere, she resolved silently. Not until I know what happened. What it was I did to make you despise me, as you clearly do.
His black hair gleamed as he dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘I can’t help admitting I’m surprised that the girl I knew would let a little thing like motherhood stand in the way of her plans.’
That didn’t sound like her at all, Magenta thought, puzzled. She loved little Theo more than anything else in this world. He was the moon and the stars and the earth to her, she mused with a wistful little smile, and she loved him so much it hurt.
Tentatively, resting her arm on the counter and supporting her chin with her hand, she invited, ‘So, tell me about the girl you knew.’
He laughed softly and leaned forward so that she caught the shiver of his breath against her hair, the subtle and yet disturbing sensuality of his personal masculine scent. ‘I really don’t think you’d welcome hearing it,’ he murmured silkily.
The glittering blue of his eyes touched on her upturned mouth. A mouth more than one photographer had complimented, saying it had a natural pout.
Quickly Magenta drew back, standing tall again now that the swaying sensation of a few moments ago had passed.
‘Maybe you’re getting me mixed up with someone else,’ she ventured, hoping against hope that it might be true, but knowing in her heart of hearts that it wasn’t. The way her mind and her body had reacted the moment she’d seen him come through that door dispelled any doubt that they had been lovers. ‘Or maybe you just didn’t know me very well.’
‘Oh, I think I did.’
His tone, though soft, held a wealth of derogatory meaning, and Magenta wished someone else would grab her attention—demand to be served. But no one did. He obviously commanded too much respect for anyone to challenge him over monopolising one of the bar staff, and secretly she wondered what he did for a living. What it was that gave him his unmistakable air of autonomy—that bred-in-the-bone confidence? Because he hadn’t got that from working all hours in a backstreet Italian restaurant, and from the flashes of hazy memory that were puncturing her brain that was the situation in which she was putting him.
‘Well, as I said, I don’t remember.’ She would hate to admit it to this man who was being so openly hostile, and yet she was on the verge of telling him why, in the hope that he would be able to break down some of the barriers in her brain, when he let out a sound of increasing impatience.
‘You’re still trying to deny we even knew each other?’
He sounded so hard and looked so forbidding that Magenta felt her confidence waning, felt herself shrinking back behind the curtain of self-protection she’d created in order to hide from life until she was ready to grit her teeth and allow herself to take on new challenges—challenges which at the start had seemed insurmountable. But, determined not to let this man’s prejudice undo all the good that the past few years of hard work and perseverance had produced, she swallowed her fears and misgivings and plunged in.
‘What did I do? Stop seeing you because of someone else? Or was it my career? Whatever it was, at least you can go away with the satisfaction of knowing that I probably got my just deserts and didn’t realise all those dreams I was obviously stupid enough to throw you over for.’
His lips held a ruminative smile that did nothing to warm the icy blue of his eyes.
‘Now, there you’re wrong,’ he murmured in a voice that was silkily soft. ‘Our little...interlude wasn’t significant enough for me to harbour any long-term desire for revenge, so there’s no need to beat yourself up over it unnecessarily, Magenta.’ His tone suggested that that was the last thing he expected her to be doing. ‘We’re all guilty at times—especially when we’re young—of setting our sights beyond what we can realistically achieve.’
He’d said he wasn’t harbouring any desire for revenge over whatever she was supposed to have done, but it was obvious to Magenta that he was getting satisfaction from seeing her now.
‘You’d be surprised what I’ve achieved over the past five years or so.’ Her pride forced her to utter the words before she could control the urge.
‘Oh, really?’ A quizzical eyebrow lifted. ‘Like what?’
Like learning to walk again. Like holding a knife and fork! Like taking over responsibility for my own precious little baby. Like staying alive!
Unconsciously she fingered the red and black choker that lay strategically over one of her now fading scars. He didn’t need to know any of that. Or about the Business Studies course she had taken, which had enabled her to apply for the new position she was hoping to get, which would lift her out of temping by day and working behind a bar a couple of nights a week and allow her to provide a better future for her and her son.
‘It isn’t important,’ she dismissed on a defeated little note. Anyway, he was acknowledging lanky young Thomas, who had loped back with his change and was apologising for keeping him waiting.
Magenta’s gaze fell to the lean, masculine hands now lifting the tumblers off the counter. Hands which she knew had once taken her to paradise and back and which were surprisingly devoid of any rings.
But there were two glasses. Two drinks...
His eyes caught her unconcealed interest and he shifted his position slightly—deliberately, Magenta guessed—creating a breach in the crowd and allowing her eyes to make their way to the smartly dressed, very attractive redhead sitting at one of the tables. She was looking at Andreas with a smile born of familiarity and undisguised appreciation.
Looking quickly back at Andreas, Magenta felt his eyes resting too intently on her face. Eyes that were penetratingly perceptive. Much too aware...
‘As I said...’ His mouth twisted with cruel satisfaction. ‘Life’s been good,’ he reiterated, before moving away.
Magenta stood there for a moment, feeling as though she had just come through some invisible, indescribable battle. She felt sick, and her head was thumping, and all she wanted to do was run away and hide. But someone had started giving her an order and she knew she couldn’t just run off without doing her job, even if it was under the smug gaze of a man who clearly despised her.
‘Is that guy a boyfriend of yours?’ Thomas asked over his shoulder as Magenta finished serving the woman.
Over the sounds of a live band setting up their instruments in the designated corner of the wine bar, she could only manage a negative murmur as she shook her head.
‘No?’ A mousy eyebrow disappeared beneath a tangled mass of equally mousy hair. ‘Then why was he looking at you as though he was determined to rip that dress off?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Dazed though she was, her colleague’s observation pumped up Magenta’s skittering heart-rate, lending a pink tinge to her otherwise colour-leeched face. ‘He’s with someone.’
‘He was.’
‘What?’ She couldn’t see past the wall of customers and the band doing its sound check against a babble of laughter and mixed conversation.
‘I swear he downed that whisky in one and hustled his girlfriend out the door before she had time to draw breath.’
For some reason Magenta’s stomach seemed to turn over. ‘He did?’ Another glimpse towards his table through a sudden gap in the human wall showed only an empty tumbler and a barely touched glass of orange juice that had clearly been hastily abandoned.
‘So? They must have been in a hurry to get somewhere,’ Magenta supplied, wondering why they had left in such a rush. Was it because of her? she speculated, her heart hammering against her ribcage and her head starting to swim. Couldn’t he stand being under the same roof with her long enough for the woman he’d brought with him even to finish her drink?
‘Hey! Are you all right?’ she heard Thomas ask again as she staggered, dropping her head into her hands to try and stanch the rising nausea.
‘No, I’m sorry. Could you call me a taxi?’ she appealed to Thomas, before staggering to the Ladies’ again, where she was violently sick.
* * *
He had behaved badly, Andreas thought as he was driving home alone, but it had been both shocking and unsettling—far more unsettling than he wanted to admit—seeing Magenta again.
He had been twenty-three to her nineteen, and just a dogsbody in his father’s floundering business, and yet he should have known right away what kind of a girl she was. She had been living in a rundown terraced house with her man-crazy alcoholic mother, who hadn’t even known who Magenta’s father was!
He’d taken pity on her, Andreas told himself, as the beam of oncoming headlamps slashed cold light across his hardening features. Why else would he have got himself mixed up with her? But hot on the heels of that self-deluded question came the real answer—one that heated his veins and caused a heavy throbbing in his blood.
Because she’d been warm and exciting and more beautiful than any other girl he had ever met in his life—and he had known quite a few, even then. Although not enough to have learned that girls like Magenta James were only out for one thing. A good time—regardless of the cost to anyone else, particularly the poor sucker who happened to be providing her with that good time!
Tension locked his jaw as he turned the steering wheel to cross a junction.
She had known she was beautiful. That was the problem. A part-time receptionist who had been on every model agency’s books, following every lead and promotion she could grasp in a bid to capitalise on her beauty. That was when she hadn’t been at home, trying to shake her mother out of a drunken stupor!
They had become lovers almost at once, just a few days after they’d started dating, and only a week after he had seen her in his father’s restaurant with a group of women during a lively hen party. Surprisingly, she had been a virgin the first time he had made love to her, and yet he had unleashed a fire in her that he’d been foolish enough to believe burned for him alone.
They had made love everywhere. In his van. In the flat above the restaurant when his father and grandmother were out. In her surprisingly immaculate, sparsely furnished little bedroom which had seemed like an oasis amidst the clutter and chaos of her mother’s damp and crumbling, sadly neglected Edwardian house.
It hadn’t mattered one iota that his family hadn’t liked her—although he had wondered, with the gentle memory of his mother, how she might have viewed Magenta if she hadn’t died while he was still very young. His grandmother, though, had been totally out of touch with people of his generation, and his father...
He slammed his mind shut as a well of excruciating pain and reproach threatened to invade it. Their disapproval, he remembered, had only intensified the excitement of being with her.
Of course they had known what she was like; they had been able to see through the thin veil of her bewitching beauty when he hadn’t. He had been blinded and totally duped by her impassioned but hollow declarations of love.
He had been hardworking, loyal to his father, and yet ambitious. And he had at least been able to see and recognise the flaws in the way in which his father had run the restaurant. Giuseppe Visconti had been a far more proficient chef than he had been a businessman, and as proud an Italian as he’d been a dictator of a father, and he had refused to listen to his son’s radical plans for saving and developing the business.
‘Over my dead body.’
Andreas still flinched now from recalling his father’s exact words.
‘You will never have a foothold in this business. Dio mio! Never! Not while you are stupid enough to be mixed up with that girl.’
He had been a blind and naive fool to believe that love could conquer all, that with Magenta James beside him he could overcome his family’s prejudices and his father’s stubbornness. What he hadn’t realised, he reflected coldly, was that the lovely Magenta had only been amusing herself in his bed—that even as he had been drowning in the heat of their mutual passion she had already been sexually entangled with someone else.
He hadn’t wanted to believe his father’s smug revelations—and wouldn’t have if he hadn’t gone round to her house unexpectedly and seen Rushford’s car parked outside. A huge and expensive black saloon that had stood out like a sore thumb in her rather downmarket neighbourhood, and especially outside her mother’s particularly rundown house.
He’d driven away on that occasion, still unable to believe his eyes—and indeed what his family had been telling him. But hadn’t he had graphic proof of her infidelity himself?
‘Do you really think I was ever serious about you? About this?’ she had scoffed on an almost hysterical little bubble of laughter the last time he had seen her.
She’d shot a disparaging glance around the deserted and already failing restaurant. That was when she had informed him of all her precious Svengali was doing for her and all that she was intending to achieve.
He had had a row with Giuseppe Visconti that night. One of many, he reflected. But this one had been different. It had been the squaring up of two male animals intent only on victory over the other. Savage. Almost coming to blows. He’d blamed his father for the outcome of his relationship with Magenta. Giuseppe had called her names, foul names that Andreas had never been able to repeat, and he’d accused his father of being jealous of his youth and his prospects, of depriving him of his right to be his own man.
His father had died in his arms that night after the angry tirade that had been too much for his unexpectedly weak heart to take. Two months later his grandmother had put the restaurant on the market to pay off the loans the business had been unable to meet, determined to go back to her native Italy.
Some time afterwards, when Andreas had been in America, someone—he couldn’t remember who—had told him that Magenta was living in the lap of luxury with a big-shot called Marcus Rushford and that she was expecting his baby.
Yes, he’d behaved badly tonight, Andreas reflected grimly as he swung his car through the electrically operated gates of his Surrey mansion. But at the end of it, looking back, he decided that he hadn’t behaved badly enough!
CHAPTER TWO
ALL THE WAY home in the taxi Magenta’s head was throbbing, pulsating with an invasion of jumbled images. When at last she had paid the driver, was staggering towards the privacy of her own bathroom, the kaleidoscope of confusing images started to take some form.
Meeting Andreas in that restaurant. Laughing with Andreas. Making love with him.... Where, it didn’t matter. It hadn’t mattered then. She pressed the heels of her hands against the wells of her eyes, her breath catching as a heated and desperate desire took hold in her mind. Why had it been desperate? She shook her head to try and jolt herself into remembering. She had to remember...
There was a big man. Sullen. Andreas’s father! And Maria. Maria was his grandmother! Oh, but there had been such ill feeling! She recalled feeling the lowest of the low. There was shouting now. Andreas was shouting at her. Telling her she was shallow-minded and materialistic. Telling her she was no good—just like her mother.
In a crumpled heap beside the toilet she relieved herself of the nausea that remembering produced and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. For the first time she was glad that Theo was spending part of his school holiday in the country with her great-aunt. It would have distressed her little boy to have seen her in such a state.
Winding her arms around herself, she ached for him, missing him as much as on the day when she had woken up from that coma to realise she’d lost not only two months of her life, but also the baby she’d remembered carrying. It was the only thing she had remembered. Except that she hadn’t lost him...
She started sobbing with all the same poignancy with which she’d sobbed that day when her widowed aunt, Josie Ashton, had brought her healthy eight-week-old son into the hospital and laid him against her breast. Dear Great-Aunt Josie, with her abrupt manner and her outspokenness, whom Magenta hadn’t seen for at least ten years. But the woman had had no qualms, she remembered, about answering her mother’s cry for help when a sick daughter and the arrival of a new grandson had been too much for Jeanette James to cope with.
She was sobbing equally, though, for the way her mind had blanked out her child’s father. How could she have forgotten him? she agonised, feeling the loss for her son, for the lack of a father figure in his life, rather than for herself. What had he done that had driven her subconscious into shut down so completely? What had she done? she wondered, suddenly seized by the frightening possibility that she might somehow deserve his condemnation.
For heaven’s sake, think! she urged herself, desperate for answers.
But the floodgates that had started to open refused to budge any further, and by the time she arrived at her interview the following week, she felt worn out from the effort of trying to force them apart.
‘I see from your CV that you only acquired your qualification in Business Studies over the last eighteen months, and that you didn’t work anywhere on a permanent basis for the preceding four years,’ said the older of the two women who were interviewing her.
There was a middle-aged man there too, who suddenly chipped in with, ‘May I ask what you were doing in the meantime?’
‘I’ve been bringing up my son,’ Magenta supplied, relieved to be able to say it without any hesitation in her speech, especially when she felt as though she were facing an inquisition.
The interview was for the post of PA to the marketing manager of a rapidly expanding hotel chain, and Magenta had gone for a totally sophisticated image. With her hair up, and wearing a tailored grey suit and maroon camisole, with the stripes in the silk scarf around her neck blending the two colours, she didn’t think she could have looked smarter if she had tried.
She was desperate to get this job to help her pay off her mounting debts so that she could stay on in her flat and give her child all the security and comforts she herself had never had. For that reason she had chosen not to disclose everything about herself when she had applied for this position three weeks ago, certain that the reason she hadn’t been offered any of the endless list of the other jobs she had applied for was because she had been too forthcoming with the truth.
But this job looked as if it was hers—particularly as the older woman on the other side of the desk was making no secret of the fact that she favoured Magenta over the only other candidate on the shortlist.
‘And you won’t find it a problem dividing your time between the demands of the office and those of a five-year-old?’ The younger, fair-haired woman, by the name of Lana Barleythorne, was challenging her. ‘He can’t have been at school very long...’
‘Well over a year,’ Magenta supplied, proud of how bright and advanced for his age her little boy was. ‘And I do have very satisfactory childcare.’ She didn’t tell them about Great-Aunt Josie, who had shown her and Theo such unconditional love when they had needed it most.
Her answer seemed to please her interviewers, because the more matronly of the two women was now explaining that the marketing manager for whom she’d be working was attending a conference that day but had asked if Magenta would be prepared to come in and meet her later in the week.
Yes! Had she been on her own Magenta would have punched the air in triumph. ‘Of course,’ she answered calmly instead, hoping she didn’t look too desperately relieved.
She was still trying to keep her concentration on what they were saying, and to stop herself grinning from ear to ear, when a knock had her gaze swivelling across the large modern office to the tall man in an immaculate dark suit who was striding in.
Andreas! Magenta tried to force his name past her lips but no sound came out.
What was he doing here? she wondered, aghast. And why had he barged in dressed like that, as though he had every right to?
‘Mr Visconti...’ The older woman, looking surprised, was getting to her feet, but a silent command from him had her subsiding back onto her chair. ‘This is Miss James,’ she explained. ‘We were just about to wind up her interview.’
‘I know.’
The deep voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. But he hadn’t yet looked her way and Magenta guessed that he hadn’t connected the name with her or realised that it was his ex the woman was referring to, now sitting there in a state of shock.
‘That’s why I came in.’
The impact of his sudden entrance had made her go weak all over, she realised, and then he suddenly glanced her way and his intensely blue eyes met the stunned velvety-brown of hers.
‘Mr Visconti is our Chief Executive,’ her principal interviewer was telling Magenta, through what seemed like a thick and muffling fog.
Chief Executive? How could he be? she wondered when she finally managed to grasp what the woman had said.
‘He’s the man we’re all ultimately answerable to,’ said Lana Barleythorne, who seemed to be having difficulty keeping her eyes off him. ‘He has the last word on whatever changes might be taking place throughout the chain.’
‘And I’m afraid this position has already been filled.’
He took his eyes off Magenta only briefly, to direct a glance towards the people she now realised, staggeringly, were his employees.
‘But we thought—’ piped up Lara, his clearly adoring fan.
‘It’s Miss Nicholls—the last candidate,’ he stated tonelessly, and in a way that imparted to anyone who might dare to challenge him that his decision was final and no one else had the authority to question it. ‘I’ve already spoken to...’
Numbly, Magenta only half heard him saying that he had spoken to his marketing manager and she was happy to take the other candidate on.
‘I see.’ The woman who was obviously the spokesperson for the three sounded surprised.
And all at once, through her shock and mounting dismay over losing a job that had not only been within her grasp but which she had been counting on to get her out of financial deep water, Magenta began to see things as they really were.
He had known she was in here. Probably from some list he had vetted before coming in. Which was why he hadn’t shown any sign of surprise or shock when he had seen her. Because he had already decided—even before he had opened that door—to snatch the chance of that job right out of her hands!
‘Miss James...’
The woman Magenta knew she had won over from the start made a futile little gesture with her hands.
‘What can I say? Except that I think we owe you an apology.’
For what? Magenta thought, hurting, angry. For building up her hopes? For making her think she could be out of the woods with her finances and her barely affordable flat? For throwing her back into the never-ending queue for far too few realistically paid jobs? Perhaps they didn’t have bills to pay and debts to settle, but she did! And now, just because she’d walked into a company controlled by this man with an obvious score to settle, none of those bills were ever likely to be paid!
Not caring any more about what impression she created, she leaped up from her chair and, in response to the woman’s suggestion about owing her an apology, uttered, ‘Yes, I believe you do! I’ve had to take a whole morning off work—without pay—to enable me to come to this interview today, and I think that the least you could have done in return would have been to get your facts straight! It might not be any skin off your noses to drag people here under false pretences, but if this is the way your company operates then I hope your paying customers don’t arrive at their hotels only to find the previous guests still occupying their beds!’
She felt sorry for her interviewers—particularly the woman who had shown such enthusiasm for her capabilities before their cold and calculating boss had walked in. Her venom was directed solely at Andreas. She hadn’t wanted to show him up in front of his staff, but if she had, she thought fiercely, then after what he had just done it was no more than he deserved!
‘That’s all I have to say,’ she concluded. And she had done so without embarrassing herself, or even tripping over her words, she realised, pivoting away from them—from him—as the ordeal and the thought of what it would mean for her and Theo brought shaming tears to her eyes.
‘Miss James.’
The deep, masculine voice addressed her formally from across the room but she ignored it, tearing over the high-polished floor to the door through which she had come with such high hopes only half an hour earlier.
‘Magenta!’
He didn’t seem bothered by what the others might make of him calling her by her first name, and images of a young man swam before her eyes. A young man who was determined, high-spirited and unrestrained—a young Andreas who refused to be dominated by his father’s will....
His softer command—and it had been a command, though infused with a persuasive familiarity—stopped her in her tracks.
Standing there, with her heart banging against her ribcage, she brought her head up, breathing deeply to control her humiliating emotion, squaring her back beneath the silver-grey jacket before she steeled herself to turn around.
‘There is another vacancy,’ Andreas said.
The distance she had put between them had given him a greater vantage point from which to study her, and he was doing just that, allowing his cool gaze to travel over the slender lines of her body in a way that made Magenta almost forget that there were other people in the room.
She looked at him questioningly but he was addressing the other three, who appeared to be silently querying his declaration.
‘It’s all right. I’ll handle this,’ Andreas told them, and one by one they filed out—the younger woman seeming to shoot daggers in Magenta’s direction, the elder sending her a surprisingly knowing smile.
‘So what is the vacancy?’ Magenta’s mouth felt dry as the door closed behind them. The air seemed charged with something sensual, stiflingly intimate even in the spacious modern office. ‘Or is this all a clever ploy to try and keep me here?’
Andreas moved around the desk and leaned back against it, his hands clutching his elbows, one foot crossed over the other.
‘I think we should talk first,’ he said.
‘What about? Why you just ruined my chances of getting a job I was counting on?’ Tremblingly, because she was almost afraid of knowing the answer, she tagged on, ‘What did I ever do to you that you should dislike me so much?’
He laughed very softly, but there was no humour in his eyes. ‘Come and sit down,’ he ordered with a jerk of his chin towards her vacated chair.
‘I prefer to stand, if you don’t mind.’
She did, however, move closer to him—close enough to bring her hands down on the back of the chair for some much-needed support.
‘As you wish.’ This was accompanied by a gesture of one long, lean hand.
‘Tell me what I did. I told you—I’m having difficulty remembering.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘And from experience we both know that you can be remarkably sparing with that.’
His tone flayed, bringing Magenta’s lashes down like lustrous ebony against the pale translucency of her skin.
‘We dated...’ She came around the chair and like an automaton, despite what she had said, sat down upon it, starkly aware of the cynical sound her comment produced.
‘Well, that’s one up on what you claimed to know last Friday,’ he remarked. ‘But if my memory serves me correctly we did a whole lot more than that.’
Images invaded of ripping clothes and devouring kisses. Of tangled limbs and naked bodies. Of herself spread-eagled on a bed in glorious abandon to this man’s driving passion.
She shook her head and realised that he had relinquished his position on the desk.
‘You’re crying,’ he observed, coming towards her and noting the emotion still moistening her eyes after losing the job she’d struggled so long and hard for. ‘It always heightened my pleasure to kiss you after you had been crying. It made your mouth so inviting. So unbelievably soft...’
His voice had grown quieter, Magenta realised, tormented again by sensual images of the two of them together, by the arousing sensations that were invading every erogenous zone in her body.
‘I’m not crying,’ she bluffed, in rejection of everything he was saying—and then caught a sudden, startling glimpse of herself from somewhere in her past, crying bitterly. She was sobbing because she had to leave him. She’d known she had to get away from him. But why? ‘I’m annoyed—angry—humiliated. But I’m certainly not crying. If you want to hurt me then that’s your problem—not mine. But, just for the record, was that rather uncalled-for remark a roundabout way of saying that you were always upsetting me?’
Within the hard framework of his features his devastating mouth turned uncompromisingly grim. ‘I wasn’t the one responsible for causing you pain in the past, and I certainly did nothing to make you weep. Except in bed.’
His continual references to the passion they had shared were unsettling her beyond belief. As he probably intended them to, she realised, catching a different sound now from the darkest corners of her mind. The sound of herself sobbing with desire at the enslaving, unparalleled pleasure he was giving her. But there were other things too. Things she didn’t want to remember, which his disturbing presence alone was bringing back to her.
‘Your family hated me.’
‘That was my family.’
‘Especially your father.’
His face took on the cast of an impregnable steel mask. ‘And with good cause, I think. In the end.’
She wanted to ask him why. What it was she had done to make him despise her so much. But he was still too cold, too distant and far too unapproachable. And anyway she was afraid of what hearing the truth might do to her.
‘How is he? Your father?’ she enquired tentatively.
‘My father’s dead.’
From the way he said it he might easily be implying that she had had something to do with it. Oh, no! She couldn’t have, surely? she thought, shuddering at the hard, cold emotion she saw in his eyes which seemed to be piercing her like shards of ice.
‘He’s dead,’ he reiterated. ‘As you would have known if you hadn’t been so tied up with making a name for yourself.’
‘Oh, I had a name, Andreas.’ It rushed back at her, hurtful and destructive. ‘And it wasn’t very complimentary. But I suppose you think I deserved what your grandmother called me?’
Her voice was low and controlled. She was determined not to let him see her trembling. And it wasn’t just the remembered pain of that time that was ripping through her memory banks and slashing at her now with such wounding cruelty, but the cold way she had just been informed that Giuseppe Visconti had died.
She wanted to ask Andreas what had happened but was even too cowardly to do that. Instead she dropped her head into her hands and groaned as a sudden vision flashed before her eyes.
It was of plate glass and fluorescent lighting where once there had been red and white chequered curtains and candlelit windows; an internet café where the little restaurant had been. She had found herself standing outside it once a couple of years ago, not even realising why, or what she was doing there. She only remembered that the experience had chilled her to the bone.
* * *
Watching her, Andreas frowned—and then reminded himself what a good actress she was.
‘I’m afraid I’m not really taken in by this display of crocodile tears,’ he said bluntly, but as she lifted her head and dragged her fingers down her face the dark smudges under her eyes and her pallor shocked him. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, concerned.
‘I’m fine.’
‘No, you’re not. I think you’d better come with me.’ He was urging her up from her chair before she had time to think.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked weakly as he bundled her into a waiting lift in the lobby.
‘As I said, we have to talk,’ he said, setting the lift in motion.
* * *
Released now from the pressure of his hand at her elbow, but finding his whole persona too disturbing in such a confined space, Magenta stepped as far away from him as she could.
A faint smile touched the firm, masculine mouth, as though he knew exactly why she had done that.
‘And, as I said, what about?’ She could feel the blood returning to her face and was managing to gather her wits about her again. ‘There isn’t any other vacancy, is there? You just wanted me to stay behind so that you could taunt me with whatever it is you think I did to you in the past. So go ahead. Get it all out of your system!’
At least then she might know, once and for all, what it was all about.
Instead he merely laughed, and that soft, mirthless laugh seemed as controlled and calculated as everything else about him. Then, with a suddenness that had Magenta’s instincts leaping onto red alert, he reached out and caught one end of her scarf. Winding it carefully around his finger, he drew her gently into his dominating sphere.
‘Is this a fashion thing?’ He tugged lightly at the silk. ‘Or is its purpose merely to conceal the remnants of your current lover’s carnal appetite?’
‘How dare you?’ She made to push him away, only to find her hands trapped between his own and the warm hard wall of his chest.
‘Yes, I dare,’ he growled, and his head came down, stopping with his mouth just a breath from hers.
It was the unfathomable dark emotion she saw in his eyes as her trembling gaze wavered beneath his that seemed to rob the breath from her lungs—that and the thunderous hammering of his heart.
She wasn’t sure who made the next move, but suddenly their mouths were fused in a hungry and antagonistic passion, and her arms were sliding up around his neck as his stronger ones tightened around her, welding her to him.
She was nineteen again and she was laughing with him, her heart on fire, wild with a new sense of freedom and excitement. But he wasn’t laughing with her. She was laughing all by herself. And she was being weighed down with such a feeling of remorse and shame.
Fighting Andreas, she was surprised when he let her go—and so roughly that she almost stumbled back against the far wall of the lift.
Groaning, she put her hand to her mouth, stemming a new bout of nausea. She realised it wasn’t that devastating kiss that was responsible for her crushing feeling of self-disgust.
‘Forgive me for being under the impression that you wanted that as much as I did. Even when you were sleeping with another man you were never averse to my touch.’
Whether she deserved that or not, Magenta felt her hand itch to make contact with his dark, judgmental face.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he advised, breathing as erratically as she was.
She was grateful when the lift opened, and didn’t need Andreas’s prompting to step out.
‘Where are we?’ she demanded over her shoulder. Before he answered she realised that they were on the top floor of the building, where wide windows gave a breathtaking view of the bustling capital below.
‘You aren’t feeling well,’ Andreas commented as he moved past her and used a security key to open the door to an executive suite. ‘Whether from fatigue or simply—as your weight seems to suggest—because you aren’t eating enough, I didn’t welcome the thought of you passing out on me down there.’
‘Thanks,’ Magenta responded tartly, her breathing still irregular from the unexpected and disturbing scenario in the lift. Or had she expected it? The question raged through her consciousness with the disturbance of a ten-force gale. She only knew she had wanted it. Dear heaven, had she wanted it!
A low whistle passed through her lips as Andreas let her into a luxuriously decorated office. It was all there: the solid wood floor, an imposing mahogany desk that looked out over the city, the softest leather settees, luscious plants and huge windows to complete his commercial kingdom.
‘What did you do? Win the lottery or something?’ Vague as her memories were, Magenta couldn’t equate how the son of a humble restaurateur could have gone from a virtual dogsbody in his father’s restaurant to CEO of a chain of exclusive hotels.
‘You know I never leave anything to chance.’
Fat chance. His declaration brought those two words to the forefront of her mind. It seemed to be something she had said once in connection with his telling her what he intended to do with his life.
‘I think you should have a brandy,’ he advised, already on his way over to a cabinet on the far side of the room.
‘I never drink.’ If there were still facts missing from her life then that was one fact she had never allowed herself to forget. ‘I’ve seen what it can do to people.’
He nodded, knowing what had prompted her to say it. Her mother.
Magenta recalled how hard she had battled as a teenager against her mother’s addiction, which had been constantly fuelled by a string of broken relationships.
‘In that case I’ll send for some coffee.’ Andreas picked up the phone and ordered some to be brought up in that deep, authoritative voice of his. ‘Sit down,’ he invited.
Magenta stood there, thinking of the young man whose hands she had been so drawn to when he’d set that first cup of coffee he had made down in front of her. She couldn’t get over how this new present-day Andreas didn’t even have to perform that simple task himself.
‘So what happened, Andreas?’ she asked, still standing her ground. ‘I know you’re dying to tell me, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought me up here.’ Unless, of course, he had it in his mind to take up where they had left off in the lift, she thought, her mind rejecting the idea as strongly as her body was responding to it, just to mock her.
‘You’re perfectly safe—if you’re thinking what I think you are,’ that masculine voice intoned, startling her into obeying his silent command to sink down onto one of the huge and plushly inviting settees. ‘I don’t intend to make overtures to a woman who showed such repugnance at my kisses. You put on a good show of displaying that out there—even if we both know that that’s really all it was. A show,’ he emphasised.
He was entirely miscalculating the reason for her shattering reaction in the lift—something she was certain he didn’t do very often.
‘I had a lucky break when an uncle I never knew died and left me three restaurants between Naples and Milan.’
‘So you do believe in luck?’ she uttered, reminding him of what he’d said a few moments ago about never leaving anything to chance.
‘If one can expand on that luck and make things happen.’
‘Which you did, of course.’
‘It was a gruelling, round-the-clock enterprise, building up those restaurants and then opening more in the States, where I was living until less than a year ago, then investing in and turning around the fortunes of a series of small hotels. That led on to bigger things that finally brought me here. Nothing is impossible if you’re prepared to work hard enough.’
That judgmental note was back in his voice again, and unthinkingly she uttered, ‘Instead of trading on one’s physical attributes like you seem to want to accuse me of doing?’
He gave her a withering look but didn’t actually comment as he crossed the room and came and stood in front of her. ‘Tell me about your son,’ he said without any preamble. ‘It can’t be any picnic, bringing up a child on your own.’
His words triggered something that was too elusive to grasp, yet what lingered in the forefront of her mind was a real and crushing fear. An intangible yet instinctive knowledge that if this man realised she’d had his child he wouldn’t hesitate to try and take Theo away from her....
‘What...what do you want to know?’ she faltered, casting her eyes down briefly, her lashes dark wings of ebony against the wells of her eyes. Had he detected the tension in her? she wondered when she saw the deepening groove between his thick black brows. Guessed at the reasons for her reluctance to discuss her little boy?
‘Did Rushford really dump you before you’d even reached the full term of your pregnancy?’
So he was still insisting that Marcus Rushford had been her lover. The thought of sleeping with her former exploitative agent made her stomach queasy, even though he was an attractive and very worldly man. That was preferable, though, to the possible consequences of explaining to Andreas that he was the father of her child, and crazily she uttered, ‘If it makes you feel smug, believe it.’
His response to that was merely a slight twitching of his mouth. ‘So...does Rushford even see his son?’
Magenta’s mouth felt dry. She wished the coffee would come as she struggled for composure under this very disturbing line of questioning.
‘His name is Marcus. And, no, he doesn’t ever see Theo.’
‘What?’ Hard lines of disbelief lined Andreas’s face. ‘Never?’ He looked and sounded appalled.
‘Never,’ she uttered dismissively, deciding to end the conversation there and then. ‘There never was another vacancy, was there?’ she accused again, deciding he really had only brought her up here to satisfy some warped agenda of his own. ‘So now you’ve shown me just how well you’re doing...’ quickly she got to her feet ‘...and clarified that all those rumours you heard about me were probably true, I’ll be on my way.’
Trying to save face before she walked away from him, wondering how in the world she was ever going to pay her mounting bills, she forced back her concerns and told him, ‘This wasn’t the only job I was being interviewed for today.’
She hadn’t even reached the door when she heard him say confidently, ‘Liar.’
She swung round, speechless at his mocking arrogance.
‘I haven’t got where I am today without gaining some insight into human nature,’ he disclosed, moving towards her with the self-possessed demeanour of a man who knew he was right. ‘A woman doesn’t normally go to pieces over losing the prospect of a job, as you nearly did down there, if she has another package tucked neatly up her sleeve and hasn’t pinned her hopes on just one that she thinks might be a little way out of her league.’
Was that what he thought? That she wasn’t suitable for the post? ‘I didn’t think any such thing! And I wasn’t going to pieces, as you’d like to imagine I was.’
‘Weren’t you?’ The trace of a smile played around his mouth. ‘You seem to forget—I know you. Although you’ve done your level best since we met again last Friday to try and make me believe you’re suffering from some sort of selective memory loss, I do know you, Magenta. Very well. I know how your eyes always glitter when you’re inviting me to challenge you. How the excitement of some delightful reprisal serves to put colour in your cheeks.’
He was moving purposefully towards her, making her instincts scream in rejection. Her body, though, trembled with the excitement he had spoken of—even as she feared that he might just remind her of what other responses he could evoke in her, as he had done on the way up here.
‘Apart from which,’ he added, coming to a stop just centimetres in front of her, ‘you were almost visibly shaking. Just like you’re doing now.’
She wanted to protest and say that she wasn’t shaking, and that the other responses he had mentioned were just a figment of his self-deluded ego. But if she did that then they’d both know that she was guilty of doing what he had accused her of doing a few moments ago. Telling lies.
He was playing with her just for his own warped sense of satisfaction, she guessed, feeling the burn of humiliating tears sting the backs of her eyes again, and she knew she had to get out of there before she showed herself up completely.
‘Goodbye, Andreas.’
He was at the door, blocking her exit, even before she had time to reach for the handle.
‘Do you really think I asked you up here just for my own amusement?’ he drawled, startling her with how close he had come to reading her thoughts. But then—as he had said—he knew her, didn’t he?
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘All right, I brought you up here,’ he amended casually, as though it was of no consequence. ‘But at the time you didn’t seem in a fit state to handle anything else.’
His eyes were raking over her face as though looking for signs of her earlier weakness, but his subtle reference to that kiss they had shared earlier was far too disconcerting and Magenta swallowed, taking a step back.
‘Do you have a point?’
That smile touched his lips again as he moved around her, away from the door.
‘Ah, the same old Magenta. Always cutting to the chase.’
‘I’m in a hurry.’
‘Of course. Your other interviews.’ His tone mocked. ‘However, despite all your accusations and suspicions regarding my ulterior motives, there is another position becoming vacant in this company.’
‘There is?’ Magenta’s heart gave a little leap of hope, although she was still viewing him with suspicion.
‘Another PA is taking an indefinite spell of leave,’ he told her with a grimace. ‘Rather sooner than we expected her to. We haven’t yet found anyone suitable to fill the post.’
‘And you’re offering me the position?’ Something like relief started to trickle through her veins. Could this mean that there was an end in sight to her endless and ever-increasing money worries? That she wouldn’t be forced to impose on her great-aunt’s generosity when Josie had given so much of herself already?
‘Why so surprised, Magenta? Your CV looks promising, if a little lacking in experience, and it does say that you can start right away. The PA in question is taking time off to look after her mother during a period of scheduled surgical operations and she’s expected to be away for four or five months. She’s the one, incidentally, whom you were trying very hard not to let me catch you looking at in the bar the other night. I was trying to talk her out of going so soon, but circumstances dictate that I have to be a gentleman about it and comply with her wishes. In short, Magenta, you’ll be working for me.’
A tremulous little laugh left her lips—something between amazement and utter disbelief. ‘Tell me you’re joking?’ A crushing disappointment was replacing her premature relief.
‘I never joke about business matters.’
‘Why? Why, when you so obviously don’t like me, would you want to employ me?’
‘You know...I’ve asked myself that very question,’ he said.
He moved closer to her—close enough to reach out and lift her chin between his thumb and forefinger. His warmth seared her skin, making her catch her breath.
‘And?’ It came out as a croak. She was trying not to let him affect her, trying not to breathe in the tantalising freshness of his cologne.
He shrugged. ‘I need an assistant. You’re looking for a position.’
‘I had a position—or as good as,’ she interjected. ‘Until you came and snatched it from me.’
His hand fell away from her, although his eyes never left her face. ‘Well, maybe I’m just nursing a masochistic need to have you working for me.’
‘So you can remind me every day of how badly I treated you?’ If she had treated him badly. Think! she urged herself, but nothing would come.
Andreas’s laugh was infused with irony. ‘I thought I made that clear when I saw you last Friday? Your actions in the past left no indelible marks.’
‘Well, that’s all right, then, isn’t it?’ she breathed, silently disturbed by his chilling declaration. ‘And you’d still take me on after you’ve intimated that the job I was applying for was out of my league. This is obviously a far more responsible position, and you’ve already said I’m lacking in experience. What makes you imagine I’m up to meeting all your requirements?’
‘Oh, you’ll meet them, Magenta. Rest assured about that.’
He wasn’t saying anything, but something in the dark penetration of his eyes made her shiver. Somehow he didn’t seem to be just talking about his requirements of a PA.
‘Well, thanks, but no thanks,’ she said, turning away.
‘You’ll walk away knowing that the lease on your flat is hanging in the balance and that you don’t even have the resources to renew it?’
She swung round to face him, the tears she had been fighting since the moment he’d strode in and ripped all her hopes apart now glistening unashamedly in her eyes. ‘How did you know that?’
‘You’ve just confirmed it,’ he said. ‘Apart from which one of my colleagues who attended your first interview mentioned the letter that you asked for.’
‘The letter?’ she murmured, and was suddenly mortifyingly aware of what he meant.
She’d made a fool of herself at that first interview by prematurely believing, from the way the conversation was going, that they were already offering her the job. She’d been so desperately relieved that she’d asked if she could have their offer in a formal letter, which she could pass on to her landlord’s agents. It didn’t take half a brain—let alone a keen mind like his—to work out the reason why.
‘So you decided to capitalise on my misfortune?’
‘I’m offering you a job.’
‘Not the sort I’m willing to take.’
‘On the contrary, Magenta. I think you’ll take any job you can get. And may I point out that I’m not the one implying anything improper? You are.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No. And I’m not sure what you’re getting so falsely modest and indignant about,’ he stated. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time you’d sold yourself to the highest bidder.’
It was obvious that he believed what he was saying, and that he would never cease to remind her of it or to exact retribution for it—which was the only reason, she was sure, that he was offering her the position now.
‘I’ve never sold myself!’ she emphasised, trying to ignore the goading little voice inside her head that was asking, How do you know? ‘I haven’t,’ she reiterated, trying to convince herself in spite of it. ‘And I’m not selling myself to you, Andreas,’ she tagged on. But there was desolation in her eyes as she realised that for her own sake, and especially for Theo’s welfare, she had very little choice but to accept his offer.
His mouth compressed with evident satisfaction as a knock on the door announced the arrival of the coffee.
‘Well, we’ll see, shall we?’ he said, knowing as well as she did that she was beaten.
CHAPTER THREE
MAGENTA WOKE WITH a start, sweating and trembling. She had been dreaming that she was looking for something and didn’t even know what it was, but as the trembling subsided and the fog lifted from her brain things started to become a little clearer.
She had been sobbing while she was asleep because of something she had lost and desperately wanted back, but it wasn’t anything tangible that she had been looking for. She knew it had been something to do with Andreas....
She was lying on top of the bed, where she had slumped, drained and exhausted, after coming home from that interview today and after that unsettling time in his office. She’d remembered so much. The restaurant. His father and grandmother. Even snatches of their brief but tempestuous affair. But there were aspects of their relationship that still continued to elude her. Like what had happened to make him so hostile towards her? Had it been to do with her modelling career? And why was he so convinced that Marcus Rushford was Theo’s father?
Think!
She lay there for a while, until her brain felt fit to burst, and then with a frustrated groan forced herself off the bed and into the bathroom.
Her body had changed very little since her teenage years, she thought, catching a glimpse of the tall, slender figure in the mirror. And ever since she had grown up her unusual looks had attracted far more attention from the opposite sex than she’d wanted or encouraged—and because of it a name she hadn’t even earned.
Stepping into the shower, Magenta thought reluctantly of how her mother’s reputation hadn’t helped. With no father, and no knowledge of any, she recalled that she’d had a string of ‘uncles’ who had drifted in and out of her young life. Her mother had been unable to maintain a steady relationship with any man. One disastrous affair after another had led to her seeking solace by drinking too much, and it had been her daughter who had always borne the brunt of it. Add the stigma of her birth poverty, because Jeanette James had never been able to work, and Magenta’s schooldays had been hard—both at home and in the classroom. Somehow she had never quite fit in with her classmates, and consequently had never made friends easily. For that reason she had grown up wanting to rise above the situation she was in. And because of her face and figure—both accidents of birth—a modelling career had seemed the only way to do it.
Her physical attributes together with her background, however, had caused men to expect more from her, Magenta thought bitterly, than she’d been prepared to give. But she had resisted them all until...
By instinct alone she knew that there had only ever been one man who had set her body on fire, and that man was Andreas Visconti. But everything he had said to her today—and the other night in the wine bar—implied the contrary. For some reason he truly believed that she had had some sort of sexual liaison with Marcus Rushford....
As she lathered soap over her body a picture of a room and then a whole apartment rose before her mind’s eyes. A coldly furnished, expensive apartment. Marcus’s! she realised, shocked. She had been staying there. No, not staying. Living there, she thought, shaking her head to induce more of the same troubling recollections. But try as she did her memory refused to oblige. Whatever it was that still remained buried, she knew that it fell within a definite period. And that was the nine or ten months prior to the day just over five years ago when her mother had woken up unusually early and found her collapsed on the bathroom floor.
Her cell phone was ringing just as she was stepping out of the shower, and Magenta raced over and snatched it off the windowsill.
‘Hello, darling.’ Emotion welled up inside her until she thought her heart would burst just from hearing her little son’s voice.
‘Aunt Josie asked me to ask you if you got the job.’
Of course. She’d talked of nothing else for weeks, she reflected, shrugging into her robe and thinking of the better life she had told Theo she’d be able to give him if she was lucky enough to get through the interview—of the new football boots and the Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover she had promised him.
She shuddered as she thought of how—almost—she had had no job at all, and wondered how she would have coped if Andreas had blocked her chances of working for his company altogether. If he hadn’t gone on to offer her the temporary position she had finally agreed to take.
‘Tell Aunt Josie I didn’t take that one because I got an even better one.’ She tried to sound excited, although she didn’t know what could be better about securing a job that put her immediately under a man who had no reservations about showing how much he despised her. Except the money...
Selling herself to the highest bidder.
She shivered, wondering if by agreeing to work for him she wouldn’t be playing right into Andreas’s hands.
She had to take this job—she didn’t have any choice. Even if she was still dangerously and unbelievably attracted to him, and even though he was displaying a ruthless desire to get even with her.
But was he going to use her vulnerability and her attraction to him to do it? she wondered, with a contrary mix of apprehension and excitement. Everything about him had suggested he intended to when she had been in his office today. If he was, she thought, she only hoped she would be strong enough emotionally to resist him. At least taking this job might help to restore her memory—even if she had a deep-rooted anxiety inside about what remembering might reveal....
* * *
Andreas had arranged to pick Magenta up the following Monday morning, and he noticed the curtains twitch in an upstairs window as he pulled up outside a characterless nineteen-seventies semi-detached house which, from the two doorbells beside the rather jaded-looking front door, had obviously been converted into two flats.
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